Indonesia’s Garuda Airlines cancels order for 49 Boeing 737 Max jets
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Except that now we have a plane that behaves differently compared to the plane the pilot actually is trained for (the whole reason to implement MCAS in the first place). So now the plane comes down because it stalls where it should not according to the training of the pilot. Gee, makes me confident to fly...
I understand this as if you need to pull with 10KG of force to get a 10 degree angle of attack, then you need to pull with at least 20kg to get to a 20 degree angle of attack. I'm not going to claim that's 100% accurate but I believe it's close enough.
This is a generic requirement of part 25. So had the 737 Max been a clean sheet design it would have been a requirement. It's not just a compatibility layer to make it behave the same as old aircraft. It's a fix to make it meet the requirements of certification.
Training only came into it at the point that Boeing declined to add it to the difference training, charitably, because they felt the system was covered by existing procedures or, less charitably, because they wanted to downplay any differences to make the aircraft more appealing.
But that still means that if you disengage MCAS, you have a plane that flies out of certification specs (and by extension, out of the training), then?
To phrase it another way, without MCAS the 737 Max didn't meant the requirements of certification and so wouldn't have gone into production. The alternative wasn't to train pilots into how to handle the new stall characteristics.
Of course, the region of flight that MCAS was intended to activate in is also a bit of an edge case. Without MCAS we may have seen an aircraft flown into a stall, most likely around a critical phase of flight (landing or a go-around), but that would have involved a pilot ignoring numerous warnings (stick shaker activation, 'stall stall' oral alerts etc) and you'd be better categorised as pilot error than directly related to the handling characteristics.
Unfortunately, due to a terrible system design, MCAS appears to be activating in regions of flight outside of the design intent and with greater authority than it should ever have been given.
[1] https://www.737ng.co.uk/B_NG-Flight_Controls.pdf page 8.
MCAS will be fixed and done right. But what other systems the same mindset have enchanced.
I came across this last night, it made my head hurt:
What would really impress would be if they now ordered 49 COMAC C919 narrowbodies from China. That would send a signal that airlines are fed up with the A-B duopoly and that they're not prepared to take recycled designs any longer.
I believe that the use of recycled designs is one of the major guarantees for aircraft safety! There is nothing wrong with a gradual development process, where only small modifications are done from one revision to the next. This is a bit like continuous integration principles in software development. Building on former experience as much as possible is an important factor of quality assurance (and also efficient in many other aspects).
I understand your point, though: small modifications can sum up to a point, where they do not blend smoothly in the base design anymore - as is the case with the larger engines of the 737 8 max. At some point, designers have to refactor big.
What went (criminally) wrong with the 737 8 max, in my eyes, is the attempt to treat a large redesign as a small modification, to save (certification) time and money. It went horribly wrong, causing loss of lives and trust in the company.
And obviously Boeing is not able to understand the consequences of the loss of trust. Last week I thought, the worst thing that Boeing could do now, was to offer quick fixes (like hot patches for the software), as this would proof their incapacity to embrace the scale of the problem. But this is exactly what happened.
The reason might rather be that it doesn't make sense to purchase an aircraft passengers are reluctant to fly with. No matter how well the problems of the 737 8 MAX are resolved, its reputation is tainted. Every further accident of that type will be blamed to Boeing.
It reminds me a lot of the DC-10 in the 1970s.
Boeing will probably have to rename the 737 8 MAX and marketing it as a brand new type.
I'm pretty sure the percentage of travelers who check the type of aircraft an airline uses before booking is counted in some small fraction of a percent. I surely never did, and never heard anyone mention they did.
Also, Boeing is not going to fool any airline by simply re-branding the plane, so if airlines pressure them now to get discounts on their 737 MAX 8 orders, that obviously also applies to the rebranded plane.
(though the issue here appears to have been Boeing didn't recycle enough of the previous generation 737...)
However, the airline industry is cyclical and the current boom might be particularly big because of very low interest rates. Many aircraft are bought and leased through third party companies and everything is heavily financialised (these days, what isn't?). Additionally there are manufacturers (including a Chinese company) trying to break into the short haul market. If there is a large bust there will be a lot of orders cancelled and these cancellations may hit Boeing harder than it's competitors.
A bad knock on internal and external confidence in both Boeing and the FAA could have lasting repercussions, Boeing might find it harder and slower to develop new aircraft if they and the FAA have to rebuild institutional capability and then convince the world that they have done so. The recent investigation by the Seattle Times makes for grim reading: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/faile...
The FAA approved this. So who can trust the FAA after this? They can expect more oversight from other national approval agencies.
Make the FAA irrelevant.
With so many eyes on them at the moment, next couple of decades should be pretty good in terms of following the rules.
While there was equipment failure this was not the main cause of the crash. The very same article you link to list the following as the cause of the accident :
the crew made inappropriate control inputs that destabilized the flight path;
the crew failed to follow appropriate procedure for loss of displayed airspeed information;
the crew were late in identifying and correcting the deviation from the flight path;
the crew lacked understanding of the approach to stall;
the crew failed to recognize the aircraft had stalled and consequently did not make inputs that would have made it possible to recover from the stall.
temporary inconsistency between the measured speeds, likely as a result of the obstruction of the pitot tubes by ice crystals, causing autopilot disconnection and reconfiguration to alternate law;
It's not really comparable with what happened (probably) on those 737MAX8 planes that crashed.
How realistic is that? Where theoretically a single switch is flipped and your plane flies like they used to.
Generally for a lot of those tasks the computer is better at it than people...
At the end of the day, this is more to do with bad system design, certification problems and lack of documentation and training about a critical system than computer control.